Ahmad Jamal

"Im still evolving, whenever I sit down at the piano [...] I still come up with some fresh ideas."

"I always tried to divest myself of the music business. I wasn’t too thrilled with the music business at any time [...] So I have always sought to do other things."

"All my inspiration today," he [Miles Davis] asserts "comes from Ahmad Jamal, the Chicago pianist. I got the idea for this treatment of Autumn Leaves from him."

"Listen to the way Jamal uses space. He lets it go so that you can feel the rhythm section and the rhythm section can feel you. Its not crowded ... Ahmad is one of my favorites. I live until he makes another record."

"When my people were brought over here from Asia and Africa, they were given various names, such as Jones and Smith. I havent adopted a name. Its a part of my ancestral background and heritage: I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree."

"[In response to a comment ("I sometime-get the feeling that Jamal would rather crawl into the piano than off the bench at the conclusion of a performance, so deeply involved is he in his music") by critic Philip Elwood] Maybe so. But I regret that I still dont have enough time to spend with my instrument. I think I could become more at one with it if I did."

"It was 25 cents here, $6 there. At $6, one gets to thinking its a lot of money. So then economics started dictating the direction of my career, and thats when I started devoting more time to jazz. When I got up to $60 a week, which was as much as my father was making, I said, well, this is it. And I was doing that before I left high school."

"Miles, Thad Jones, Clark Terry, Gil Evans, myself—the reason we always stay young is because weve been part of three eras. We heard Lunceford, Hines, Basie at their peak--I was a sponge, I absorbed that era. Then it was the Gillespie-Parker era—we were still young, and again we sponged it up. Now we are living in the electronic age . . . and were still listening."

"A guy that knows all these electronic things may be great [...] but a guy who knows acoustic and electronic is better. Just like a guy who knows Mozart only may be great, but a guy who knows Mozart and Duke Ellington is better. And a guy who knows Mozart and Brahms and Ellington is even better . . . Its musical depth perception."

"If youre applying for credit and write that you’re an insurance salesman, or a member of the Chicago Symphony, you wont have trouble. But just write "jazz musician" and you cant even buy a sofa on credit."

"[On querying the permanent use of the word "jazz"] So was the word Negro ! Yet you hardly hear it anymore—its now Afro-American or black. All sorts of linguistic changes are going on: Instead of chairman we now say chairperson in order to upgrade the position of women in our society. Jazz is an important-enough area of our culture to demand constant refinement."

"Years ago, when I was growing up and bands like Basie and Ellington came to the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, where I was born, they were called entertainers. You can hardly use that word today, when men like Max Roach and Jackie McLean have tenure as professors at major American colleges."